Today we’re eating the winners of the 1948 Chicken of Tomorrow contest
modernfarmer.com
modernfarmer.com
Chickens are meant to be able to live to around 10 years old as well which makes this even worse to me. There's nothing humane or natural about it. I think consumers need to take more personal responsibility in what kind of practices their wallets are supporting.
Consumers aren't making the choice to treat the animals that way, the business are. And (most likely) without regulation, that will not change. Not enough people/consumers have enough discretionary spending to make a change (I believe). I for one don't even know where I can buy meat from well-treated chickens. Sure I can look it up, but most consumers will need to as well, which will probably not happen. It's about high time we stop putting things on the consumer (see recycling) and make the businesses do better for our ecosystem. I hope not to add too many more regulations, the fewer the better IMHO, but damn, there still needs to be some.
In reality it's a chain of choices made by multiple groups of people. The consumers, the industry, and whatever governmental regulatory bodies are involved. One group can't just give up responsibility of the choices they are making.
In the end, consumers drive the market. If there's no consumers of unethical meat, no one will unethically raise meat. Out of the groups of people involved, it's only the consumers participation that keeps the cycle alive.
Eating meat isn't a required activity for humans. If the treatment the chickens are going through doesn't seem ethical to you, continuing to eat it is hypocritical. You can totally reduce your meat consumption in order to afford eating ethically raised meat, or just not eat meat at all.
On top of that what you're saying isn't true for huge swathes of the population. They can't afford to eat ethically raised meat, they can't afford to not eat meat protein, and even if there is some (probably imaginary) way for them to do that, it requires a disproportionate amount of effort for them to do so.
Most people will think chicken is just chicken. They may be peripherally aware that there's some sort of intensive farming going on, but not really what that entails, or how horrific it is.
And so some governments around the world have stepped in and stopped those practices.
But not the US. Hence the trade arguments you may have heard about chlorinated chicken. It's not the chlorination that's the problem, it's WHY they need to be chlorinated. Because you need to do that to chicken to make it safe to eat if you grow them in those sort of horrific conditions.
So next time you think about blaming the consumer, stop and think. You've been dead wrong once. Government intervention works.
Are you wrong again?
Didn't know eating beans instead of meat for protein was a disproportionate amount of effort. It's even cheaper to boot. Those people are not invalids, they just don't care about the lives of farm animals. They may say they do, but their actions prove otherwise.
The are/became vegan, not Gollum that claim everything should be eaten raw to Sam.
Adding a few spices and a can of tomatoes make beans and rice delicious. Chana masala, black bean bowls, navy bean soup, the number of dishes you can create from a base of rice and beans is innumerable and they're all relatively simple.
The same could be said about unseasoned chicken meat on rice.
It is vegan. It simply just a very different diet from what you are used to.
Almost every culture has had a bean based dish, and eating meat with every meal is a relatively recent phenomenon in the last hundred years.
There's a reason why I replaced meat with beans and thats due to the flexibility and variety of dishes you can cook with it, across and within cultures.
All environment and cultures do not have beans in the center. The easiest examples are cultures which predominantly lived on fish.
In North America the three main agricultural crops are winter squash, maize (corn), and climbing beans. It should be no surprise that if you live there, cultural beans are great to you.
Like fish, seaweed is primarily part of the cultural diet in coastal locations. Look at the Māori people and there is a distinct lack of beans in their diet, but seaweed is used just as bean are in north America.
What you call "a hilarious false equivalency" is something I would call a lack of understand and empathy of different cultures.
Plant-based diets being prohibitively expensive is a myth, and nothing more. We know this. Nutrients, proteins, etc. It's all there, and for the same price or less than animal products.
And this type of demand is pretty inelastic. You can make a pound of chicken 25 cents cheaper or expensive an demand won't budge at all.
What you are subscribing to is market fetishism - something that works only in Econ 101 classrooms, not the real world.
Consumers want rainforests to not be destroyed for example. But how many consumers know that they are destroyed due to palm oil production? And which customer has the ability to track down globalized supply chains when choosing an ice cream, when their kids are screaming nearby?
If you go to the grocery store, there might be some organic chicken and non organic chicken, but not that much of a choice otherwise. There's no real way to know whether the place treats their chickens and workers well, what kind of feed or environment the chickens live in, if it's a local farm or a mega factory, and so on.
On the upside, the prices are lower and we get any kind of produce year round. On the downside, that produce might come from across the world, be specific breeds that survive shipping well and look good at the expense of taste, and generally not come from local farms but rather large factory farms.
When consumer's stop buying, suppliers will stop supplying. As a general rule-of-thumb for whether not any meat is the result of inhumane practices, a safe bet (_very_ safe bet), is that it _all_ is. Just don't buy meat at all and you don't need to worry about whether or not you're ethically sourcing the meat.
Also, Vote with your wallet works if the consumer has 100% information (usually assumed, but isn't the case in the real world) and enough money to do so (typically this is assumed as well, and again is untrue in practice, e.g. fixed income, low income, etc).
Are farmer john’s eggs just resold perdue eggs with a markup?
But there is a line _somewhere_ on the natural spectrum of life forms, from microorganisms, to plants, to bugs and vermin, to dogs, pigs, primates, and humans, where our attitude about loss of life and/or a miserable life changes. Where are you suggesting we put that line?
EDIT: wording
Here you go; the chicken scene from Baraka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFQhn8RW0Nk
Your comment about microorganisms is about 'where to draw the line' and your comment about 'tend to infinity' implies you like the 'appeal to extremes' form of argument.
I'm interested in what we're doing in the world now and I'm happy to suggest where a line should be drawn. I'm not worried about absolutes.
edit: Lab grown chicken exists, its just wicked expensive at the moment. Just a matter of time.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/12/2/22125518/lab-gr...
Something along the lines of: If its got eyes and an arsehole, lets treat it with some basic respect
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/12/2/22125518/lab-gr...
Would it not make sense to re-use the circulatory, filtration, energy production, digestive, and excretory systems that evolved over millions of years to locomote chicken flesh, rather than try to re-engineer these systems? Just ditch the brain. If there’s no sentience, what is the ethical difference between this and vat-grown synflesh?
I remove the bones anyway.
I would say that's accurate. I think extremes can bring out honest positions in an argument. Where would you suggest we draw a line? How long should a chicken live before we decide to kill it?
See Article 12 for poultry. There are details about how they should be kept, density, materials (e.g. straw or turf), lighting conditions, access to perches, access to outside space. Minimum age at slaughter is 81 days.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:...
Edit: And for the record I'm vegan.
It's not genocide, by definition, if we have no desire to extinct the species.
[1] https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=B1...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90461008/this-graph-will-show-yo...
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/impossible-burger#what-...
The Impossible Burger is supplemented with a ton of B vitamins (for thiamine, several weeks' supply).
Most vegans eat lots of other B containing foods, including yeast (which is after all how plant-eating animals manufacture B vitamins in the first place, by fermentation during digestion). But for those who want to get it along with their protein source, the plant-based meat-simulacra also contain it.
It’s incredibly difficult to get sufficient quantities of B12 outside of meat products or manufactured supplements.
So either way your B12 is coming from supplements. It's either in a pill already, or the flesh of animal who didn't want to die, and they simply took the pill on your behalf.
Most nutritional yeast is supplemented with B12. It's a good source of protein and other minerals.
Many vegetarians also eat fermented pickles that contain B12 naturally, though you do have to eat rather a lot to get sufficient B12.
By contrast, most non-vegetarians are very deficient in fiber, and nobody ever seems to bother about it.
[0] http://www.epic-oxford.org/publications/1554/serum-concentra...
No, they are not "clearly deficient while eating meat" as you claim. There's a documented B12 deficiency in vegans and vegetarians that isn't present in meat eaters.
> Omnivores had the lowest intake of Mg, vitamin C, vitamin E, niacin and folic acid. Vegans reported low intakes of Ca and a marginal consumption of the vitamins D and B12.
Honestly our food habits are just out of whack. If you go to any Asian or African country (outside the touristic areas) you'll find how many classical/common dishes taste great without meat. From Chinese noodle soups to Thai curries to Ethiopian bean dishes or Indian anything, you miss neither nutrients nor flavour without meat.
I would argue the vegetarian movement has made a huge impact in reawakening many 'western' recipes which disappeared when near became cheap. From beetroot to Brussels sprouts to pickles to lentil stews and grilled vegetables - lots of things are back on the plate.
All that long said for a short message: yes it can be very practical if we collectively (or individually) want it to be.
It's not practical to demand the entire planet become vegan.
As always: it's not allowed to ask for better people! We need to create a system that makes the wrong people do the right thing.
Or even better, a system that makes the "wrong" thing right (e.g. lab-grown meat).
If they can get it to 25% of its current cost, I could see it become viable to replace many uses of ground beef now. If they get it to 12-15% of its current cost, I think it would displace a massive percentage of purchases of meat protein. It really is good, not just “edible” and I can imagine they’re nowhere near the economic minimum cost to produce.
But, not be pedantic, but chicken evolved as a domesticated, food-producing animal. They're "meant" to make food, either via eggs or meat, not to have a specific lifespan.
I think it's slightly more complicated than that. The history of domestication is one of long-term relationships: we have historically bred animals not only to produce food, but also to serve roles (foodwaste removal, fertilizing, haulage) that aren't necessarily best served by rapid growth. Industrial agriculture has removed the need for most of those roles, but they're still very visible in the selected features of popular breeds.
What can you do with a pig other than eating it? As for chickens/cows, I'm fairly certain that the males are basically only useful for meat.
Male cows are best known in their neutered form (a surprising number of people think that oxen are their own species). They’re instrumental beasts of burden. But again, industrialized agriculture doesn’t have much use for them.
But that's not the primary function right? In other words, once the pig is fat enough to eat, it's slaughtered. This is as opposed to something like a chicken where it's deliberately kept around even when it's ready to be eaten.
>Male cows are best known in their neutered form (a surprising number of people think that oxen are their own species). They’re instrumental beasts of burden
Are those the same breed? Presently we have different breeds of cattle for different purposes (eg. the black and white kind for milk production). Is that a relatively recent development? Or were there "milk cows" and "beef cows" back in the day as well?
Nobody said anything about it being their primary function! As the original article mentioned, most chickens weren't kept for meat purposes until the 20th century. We're talking about what domesticated animals are "meant" to do; the answer to that is a multiplicity (with perhaps one "primary").
> Are those the same breed?
There are lots of different breeds of cattle, but yes: the word "ox" specifically refers to any male cattle breed that's been neutered. The distinction between "beef cattle" and "dairy cattle" is a modern one (with modern breeds), contemporaneous with industrialized production of both dairy and meat.
By this standard, there is no such thing as abusing a domesticated species. They're "meant to" satisfy human need X, and everything else is irrelevant.
>amplified by confinement, and while the developers come out of those cubes fatter, they tend to get sicker, too. They have insatiable appetites, which leaves them stressed, as evidenced in their poor reproduction capabilities, cardiovascular failure and skeletal problems. They’ve been pumped with so many antibiotics, they’ve developed resistances. The Developers weak legs and overworked hearts strain every week their lives are extended.
Ok. So, has the market gotten to the point that even in small towns, people can choose more humane meat? They have "free range eggs", and I pay for, basically, "free range plus", but these aren't really humane, only better: Are there other commonly available options? (Im personally pescetarian leaning heavily into vegetarian: I don't know about meat options available)
I don't think everyone is going to go vegan (it is hard to balance the nutrition) and even vegetarian isn't going to be everywhere if there is a culture of meat-eating, so the best thing we can do is less* meat, and the meat we have is humane.
But we are back at the beginning: There is realistically no way to speak with your wallet since a lot of places simply have no choice - and no way to verify claims (they might be as misleading as free range eggs).
This pretty much put us at the point where if you are moneyed enough, you can source it: Everyone else has to hope that government changes rules enough so that everyone can choose humanely produced meat.
Yes, at least in Europe. Organic meat comes with certain rules about the treatment of the animals.
edit: see Article 12 of EU Regulation 889/2008 for organic poultry standards - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:...
The downside? It's expensive. Most people, even those who care in principal, don't care enough to pay 2x, 3x, or more than the grocery store prices.
Chickens in their wild habitat will live a year, two maybe three before succumbing to predators or disease.
So if you have a hen and it’s over 3 years old, it’s older than most chickens in the wild. You should feel as guilty as a fox feels if you have it for dinner.
Edit 2: another article that seems legitimate suggests 10 years as the lifespan for the Junglefowl.[4]
I had difficulty finding the lifetime of wild Junglefowl, but they live longer than domesticated chickens e.g. “In captivity, the lifespan of the Red Jungle Fowl averages 15-20 years”[2] which suggests that the wild ancestors lived longer than you might suspect. Edit: Following the link shows that number is made up, sorry “Maximum longevity: 30 years (captivity) Observations: Chickens are considered a relatively short-lived and fast ageing species (Holmes et al. 2003). The maximum longevity in captivity of these birds, however, has been reported to be 30 years (http://www.demogr.mpg.de/longevityrecords). This is not impossible considering the large number of animals kept in captivity, yet remains unproven. For comparative analyses the use of a more conservative value for maximum longevity, such as 15 or 20 years, is recommended. Domestic chicken reach sexual maturity before six months of age.”[3].
This looks like a reasonable article about lifetimes of modern chickens: https://delaneychicken.com/how-long-do-chickens-live/
[1] https://thetakeout.com/chickens-live-longer-bone-dating-arch...
[2] https://wiki.nus.edu.sg/display/TAX/Gallus+gallus+-+Red+Jung...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20120206062215/http://eol.org/pa...
[4] https://animalalmanacblog.wordpress.com/2017/01/29/animal-sp...
https://holistickenko.com/woody-chicken-breast/
An increase in size and growth rate has caused the meat of the muscles to become harder and rigid in texture, giving a distinctive bulge to the breast and becoming known as woody breast chicken. The chicken, even when cooked well, is harder and chewy.
The white stripes that occur visually look like white lines running across the breast, tendons and thigh. A woody breast will feel firmer, like an incredibly tough muscle. When touching regular chicken breast the flesh is soft, you can press into it. Woody breast is simply firm to the touch, you cannot press into it (Kuttappan, V.A., et al., 2016). Occurrences of the woody chicken breast, as well as white stripes on chicken, have increased from around 1.4-8.7% in 2012 to a shocking 25.7-32.3% in 2015.
Ask me how I know the speaker isn't a meat eater.
Now, I am not the type to advertise my diet unless it comes up at lunch with people who don't know me or something like that. But I am not ashamed to share that cultured meat is something I've been looking forward to with great interest for all sorts of reasons.
Do what usually happens is there's at least one person to point how unnatural cultured meat sounds and that I will never work because it's disgusting.
Can't help but lol every time. I guess eating sick young chickens, who have never seen the sun, is more natural an healthy.
But I know I am not the crazy one. They are
Will cultured meat have the same outcome? Who knows.
(One of the chickens who contributed tissue for Eat Just's cultured chicken product lived out his life at an animal sanctuary near the Bay Area. But due to the breeding practices referenced in the article, it was, sadly, a short life.)
Also air chilled chicken is where it’s at. So much better than the water bath cooled ones